Get More Admin Color Schemes For WordPress 3.8

One of my favorite features of the WordPress 3.8 ‘About’ page is the live admin color scheme picker. WordPress 3.8 ships with eight different color schemes.

If you don’t find a favorite among the default color schemes, there are more options available using a plugin. A small group of designers have collaborated to bring WordPress users even more color schemes via Admin Color Schemes, which is receiving more interest now that 3.8 has been released. The plugin adds eight additional color schemes. If you install it, you’ll see the new colors available under your profile’s personal options in the admin.

More colors!

You can click through the various color schemes to “try them on” instantly. These additional schemes were created by professional designers Kate Whitley, Dave Whitley, Mel Choyce, and Kelly Dwan. There’s something for everyone here, from primary colors to pastels to nature-inspired palettes.

Aubergine – by Kate Whitley and Kelly Dwan

Create Your Own Color Schemes

For the more adventurous, you can check out the code of this plugin to learn how to create your own color schemes. You might be surprised to know that the backbone of the color schemes is just a handful of variables included in its scss file, defining the base, highlight, notification and action colors. You’ll need to compile your new scss file into a corresponding CSS file in order to make it work. Admin Color Schemes offers a nice model for how to do this.

It surprised me when I tried this yesterday, but I found the red color scheme (“sunrise”) surprisingly pleasing. I’m giving it a try for the next couple of days. (Was on MP6 before anyway, so no major changes for me.)

If you want a different colour scheme than the default to be the ‘default’ for new users e.g. to match your front end scheme better. then it is fairly simple to set up the scheme on user creation, but takes a couple of lines of code. I documented that here on my blog.